Users of the Internet have a desire to search for websites in a manner that permits them to obtain desired results easily and efficiently. Presently users must carefully formulate their queries in order to obtain the information they are seeking. This is difficult for some users, particularly novice users, as they may lack the skills, expertise, knowledge, experience or patience to formulate a query capable of yielding the desired information.
To aid users several website authors have undertaken to formulate queries that provide results that may be of interest to particular users that visit those websites. These queries provide results tailored to the content the user is assumed by the website author to be interested in, based on the fact that they are searching from a particular website. The effect of this is that the query formulated by a user from a particular website may be interpreted in a manner that is influenced by the website content. Consequently queries from particular websites may produce nuanced results.
It may not be convenient for users to visit a particular website in order to generate a specialized or nuanced search. Instead users may wish to perform searches from general-purpose search sites, such as www.google.com. Prior art, such as US Patent Application No. 2007/0239716 recognizes this wish and provides a user with an ability to specify which types of specialized searches they are interested in, so that specialized search results may be tailored to affirmed areas of interest. This is achieved by way of allowing third party content providers to create enhancements to a search result page triggered on queries matching certain patterns.
Other prior art, such as US Patent Application No. 2007/0112764, discloses a means of utilizing phases or keywords to analyze web documents. Such prior art is intended to address issues relating to correct associations, ranking, and relevancy of the keywords and phrases to web documents. These issues can be important in returning search results to a user.
In general prior art methods tend to analyze phrases by counting the frequency of a phrase within a document. Two or more phrases may have the same frequency in a document. However, it is possible that one phrase may offer a superior contribution to the meaning of the text than other phrases occurring within the text at the same frequency. Consequently, merely counting the frequency of keyphrases within text will not identify the keyphrase that is integral to the meaning of the text.